


Number Six

by CarpeDiemForLife



Series: The Loneliest Number [6]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:00:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26279824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarpeDiemForLife/pseuds/CarpeDiemForLife
Summary: All of the Hargreeves children know what it is to be lonely. It claims them each in different ways and at different times, but loneliness is the family's constant companion.--Series of ficlets examining the loneliness of each character. Sixth: Ben.
Series: The Loneliest Number [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1885654
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Number Six

Ben was a ghost. Being dead was, he felt sure, the loneliest existence of all.

He wasn’t wrong.

He wasn’t right, either.

Still, Ben had a greater claim to loneliness than almost anyone else in the universe. He’d never been alone as a child, and that turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. It gave him a much comfier childhood than many of his siblings enjoyed, but it left him woefully unprepared for the day he shuffled off his mortal coil.

The worst part: he wasn’t just dead. He was _aware_. Other ghosts, they faded in and out, little more than impressions left on the world, given greater verve whenever Klaus was nearby.

Ben was different. He was not alive but he _lived_ , perfectly cognizant of all that went on around him, of all he could not do, could not touch, taste, or impact. His brother was his sole companion. His keeper. But more than that, Klaus was his eyes and ears and hands, his only physical connection to the world. He was Ben’s choice, his reason, his direction. Only by Klaus’s goodwill was Ben given shape. Given voice and meaning. At Klaus’s prerogative, Ben became nothing more than empty words on the wind, a tree fallen in the forest where no one is around to hear.

This sensation frightened him more than the Horror ever had.

He loved Klaus. But his brother had no idea the wounds he inflicted every time he chose to ignore Ben, to treat him like the non-entity he was, leaving him adrift, alone, afraid. Insubstantial as a will-o’-the-wisp.

Ben had nothing. No conversation to fill his days nor company to stimulate his senses. Ever the watcher, the onlooker—made all the lonelier by getting to bear witness to everything he should have had. Everything that was just beyond his reach.

While in another time, and unbeknownst to him, Ben’s once-favorite brother was stuck all alone in the Apocalypse, Ben was stuck all alone in the Afterlife. One isolated by time and space. The other by death. Where Five’s loneliness was an ice cream scoop that hollowed out his mind and replaced it with something less broken, more pleasant, Ben could not escape his sanity, and his loneliness was a serrated knife, rusted and burning, carving daily into his soul.

Its cuts were the only feeling left to the ghost that used to be Ben Hargreeves.

**Author's Note:**

> Short and sweet for Ben! Only one left.


End file.
